I don't think I'm alone in becoming so inured to seeing cigarette butts on the ground that I no longer notice them. To our jaded eyes, they blend seamlessly into the landscape, an expected part of the surroundings.
And no wonder. In Westernized countries, they're the most common form of litter; every other piece of trash chucked in public places is the filtered end of a cigarette. The journal Tobacco Control estimates that each year over 4.5 trillion end up as litter (over 250 billion in the US alone). Add cigarette packs and their cellophane wrappers to the stew, and the situation becomes even worse.
Big Tobacco is eager to foster the belief that their butts are biodegradable, but no study has shown that it takes less than a year for a butt to break down. In fact, some argue that they never truly disintegrate because the filter component is made of cellulose acetate, a form of plastic which never completely goes away.
Besides being an eyesore, the butts are an environmental hazard. Most will eventually get swept into the water supply, where the hundreds of chemicals they contain will be leached out. Fish, seabirds, and other marine creatures have been known to gobble them up, mistaking them for food. If they don't outright poison the critter, they block its digestive and excretory systems. Then there are the kids who nosh on them. It's a relatively small number of children, to be sure, but those illnesses and deaths are preventable. As are the fires caused by flung butts.
Preventing cig litter isn't high up on the tobacco industry's list of priorities, though. They refuse to take many easy steps to help. For one thing, they could put “don't litter” messages on their packages, both in words and with pictograms (a person tossing trash into a wastebasket). Come to think of it, there's nothing stopping them from stamping a message like that on each and every cancer stick they make. Phillip Morris USA has recently said that it puts such messages on “select” packs, which begs the question — why not on all packs?
Another action not taken by the industry is to aggressively distribute “personal ashtrays,” small, pocket-size receptacles for holding cigarette butts. For a while, RJ Reynolds would send a free pack of thin, foil-lined personal ashtrays to anyone who requested it, but for reasons never explained, they suddenly stopped. The website CigaretteLitter.org writes: “It has long been clear that RJR had no interest in this program being successful as they never promoted it and always made sure they ran out of ashtrays on a frequent basis.”
Indeed, if the industry were serious, it could enclose one of these wafer-thin ashtrays in every pack of coffin nails. Or it could sell little plastic devices, about the size of a cigarette lighter, to serve the same purpose, if only they'd design and market them with the same zeal as the cigs themselves. Like the lighter itself, these little disposal units could become an ubiquitous part of the smoker's paraphernalia. Lighters could even have these little ashtrays built in.
Why won't the smoking industry take these and other solid steps? The answers are revealed in internal documents. A Philip Morris memo from March '98 addresses the issue, stating the company's “business objective”:
Minimize emergence of regulations resulting in product bans or committing the Company to take financial and logistical mandated responsibility for disposal of its products and/or packaging.
An internal report from the Tobacco Institute, the leading industry group, two decades prior says: “Our best course of action may be maintaining a low profile while working to exempt cigarettes from coverage of pending litter control legislation.” It recommends that “the concept of courtesy should be limited to the smoking of — rather than the disposal of — tobacco products.” The plan notes that “‘no-litter’ campaigns might be useful; but they should not be implemented before cost/benefit and political analysis has been completed.” Researcher Anne Landman of the American Lung Association explains: “[The] document shows that the industry believed that by backing any fees or taxes to help clean up cigarette litter, they would be buying into the ‘social cost’ argument against smoking.”
Of course, when push comes to flick, it's the smoker who tosses the butt on the ground. Those who don't want to contribute to the problem can use public ashtrays or buy pocket versions, such as the pen-shaped, brass “Smart Ashtray” or the colorful, plastic “BUTTsOUT.” 